Ledgard Bridge News Blog

Over the last few months I have dealt with quite a few seemingly genuine enquiries for narrowboats to be built and shipped to the USA, maybe Terry Darlington’s latest book Narrow Dog to Indian Rivermight have something to do with this?

Now my first reaction was it’s a bloody silly idea and why the hell would you want a narrow ditch crawler in the states?

But after about half a dozen enquiries I have begun to wonder.

I do know from looking at the web stats that a lot of the interest came from a link on a US based boat building site but for folk to then go on and actually bother enquiring it makes you wonder.

I am still bemused by why you would actually want a boat designed for a very specif type of waterways environment in a totally alien one that it might not even be best suited too but all I can put it down to is the novelty and British association that the Americans seem drawn too?

We do sell boats through associates and advertise occasionally in the greater Europe but where to start if we were going to try in the USA would be an absolute nightmare obviously the cheapest and probably best approach at least initially is going to be web based but doing the research and the web-work required could be very time consuming so it might be better to just find an agent out there and pay them some commission if they managed to sell one.

The Americans seem to take their boats and boating very seriously but where you would set about finding potential American narrow boaters I just don’t know?  

We are just putting the finishing touches to Stewart & Lesley MacLennan’s 57′ x 12′6″ barge Endellion. Stewart & Lesley live in Sydney but the boats name comes from Lesley’s birth place the village of St Endellion in Cornwall.

Stewart uses a wheelchair and the boat was built to his plans giving him full acess and control of the boat. Endellion is quite an advanced boat with many features rarely seen on inland waterways craft, she is fully double glazed and air-conditioned throughout, steering is provided by a electro hydraulic system controlled by follow up style steering using a small handle or alternatively a hand held remote control.

The electrical system is based around 800 Ah of batteries, twin 3000w inverters and a 7KVA cocooned genset. The genset auto starts on demand to supplement the inverters or to automatically charge the domestic battery bank these features being controlled by Victron’s innovative VE Net system.

Initially she will spend the remainder of the year in the UK before Stewart & Lesley take her over to France early next year.

Well at least it is for boat building in Mirfield!

Boats have been built in Mirfield alongside the Calder & Hebble since 1776 but this one is a bit special being the largest boat ever built in Mirfield. 

Measuring 61′ x 13′6″ she is very much in keeping with Mirfield’s boat building tradition by being a broad beam barge, narrowboats wheren’t traditionally built in Mirfied until the modern plaything narrowboats arrived in more recent years.

Boat building in Mirfield as carried on with little interruption since 1776 at least 373 wooden boats known as  West Country Boats (Keels) like the one being launched above were built here, the last boat of this type being built in 1952.

Even with the demise of the wooden commercial boats that wasn’t the end of boatbuilding because the yards attention shifted to the emerging leisure market and eventually they were at least four yards building the now popular recreational narrowboats.

It’s quite sad now that we are the last boat builder left in Mirfield (The others all went over the last ten years or so.) but ironically the days of the recreational narrrowboat seem to have passed and we now seem to be stepping back in time to building big barges again!

The builders of old might not approve of the steel construction and what they would make of the fact that nearly all off today’s boats are bound for France and will never even wet their bottoms in the waters of the Calder & Hebble they were built alongside I don’t know.

Anyway back to the ”Record Breaker” well she too is bound for France in fact she will be quite capable of sailing her self there, but she will not be wetting her bottom in the Calder & Hebble because she is simply too big! At 61′ she is too long for the locks and with a “V” bottom she is too deep in draft and would simply sit on the bottom.

I never really thought about it before but we are probably partaking in the oldest surviving industry in Mirfield, if we were to follow the trend and move manufacturing to Eastern Europe in the future then I suppose 230 plus years wouldn’t have been a bad run.

There is a bit more information about boatbuilding in Mirfield HERE .

Lots of folk seem to dabble in the world of blogs (Small private websites for the uninitiated) they are particularly useful in the boating community for providing a means of keeping family and friends informed of your exploits. Unfortunately they are a bit like keeping a diary which often starts off being a great idea and then dwindles away to become forgotten in the bottom drawer.

Many of the boat related blogs I stumble across fall into that category, for a few months I am drawn in and visit regularly and then the new posts drop off and eventually cease completely.

One boating blog that most certainly doesn’t seem fall into this category is Andrew Denny’s Granny Buttons blog where in his own words -

“Andrew Denny sounds off around England on a canal blog”

The beauty of Andrew’s blog is variety! Yes it is boat related but not in the way that some of those bloody awful cruise log type websites that delight in informing you “Today we stopped at Asda to replenish our stocks of baked beans and later tonight we will be stopping for fish & chips etc” instead Andrew takes a look at the bigger picture that he sees on his travels on his narrowboat Granny Buttons where the blog name comes from.

Andrew is very passionate too about photography his chosen theme at least on this blog being the waterways environment. The pictures he often posts on Granny Buttons are well worth viewing, Andrew (Unlike me) seems to be able to capture “mood” in his pictures especially in the night shots he often takes. 

Andrew also keeps his eye very much on the Internet for canal related news making his blog a great source of links to other canal sites and blogs.

You can take a look at the Granny Buttons blog here-

 http://www.grannybuttons.com

Saturday 3rd, Sunday 4th and Monday 5th May 2008

CANAL BASIN & COACH STREET CAR PARK, SKIPTON

Plans for Skipton’s seventh Waterway Festival are well underway with the theme of this year’s event, held over the May Bank Holiday weekend from 3 to 5 May, being chosen as Skipton Olympics. The festival is organised by a steering group of local people and Pennine Cruisers.

It attracts hundreds of boaters to Yorkshire and last year it was estimated that around 10,000 visitors came to enjoy the stalls and the varied family entertainment which took place on the canal side during the day. 

A Farmers Market will also be in Coach Street car park on Sunday 4 May, with the illuminated cruise sailing from the outskirts of town to the canal basin arriving at dusk on Sunday.

Anyone who has previously attended will be sent a mooring application for 2008. New applicants for moorings, stalls or those wanting to perform can contact Pennine Cruisers for an Application Form by emailing info@penninecruisers.com or telephone on 01756 795478.

The article in Fluvial tells of John and Irene Plunkett realising their dream on Moet Chandon, a cozy British wide beam narrow boat based in Carcassonne France.

You can read the English translation of the article HERE.

You may remember the charity boat Margaret Kane we built last year, well she now as her own website HERE.

She was specifically designed to provide memorable, affordable, holidays on the Lancaster Canal for families needing additional support. . Measuring 57 feet x 10 feet, she can accommodate and cater for up to 10 people including crew.

‘The Margaret Kane’ is managed and run by volunteers. The venture is non-profit making, and is self funding in order to cover running and maintenance costs. Trips can be varied to meet individual needs, ranging from a half-day cruise on the Lancaster Canal to as much as a 3 nights’ stay on board the boat, moored at a canal-side village or market town. Qualified crew will be on hand to assist the families throughout their cruise.

We started a new build last week of a 57ft x 12ft 6in barge for Lesley & Stewart MacLennan.

Lesley & Stewart live in Australia and plan to take the boat to France to live aboard, Stewart is a wheelchair user and the boat is being built to accommodate his needs.

Because of the distances involved we have resurrected the buildcam so they can watch the build progress on-line. (And obviously it confirms where their money is going too! )

The picture below will refresh real time every time this page loads.

The buildcam is a bit different this time to what I have had setup last time to try and keep the bandwidth usage in check, it now features two separate pages the LIVECAM page where you can view the build live via a picture that updates 3 times per minute and the WEBCAM page that is a gallery made up of snapshots taken every 20 minutes these picture can be viewed individually or in a slide show that will form a time lapse style video of the build.

They have only just started so there isn’t too much to see yet but over the next 8 weeks a hull should appear!

There as been quite a lot of miss information in the press recently about the VAT zero rating of boats, this boat will be VAT zero rated under the VAT rules for supplies to the disabled which is the only legal way that a boat can be supplied VAT zero rated.

The Dorothy Ellen was joined on the water earlier this month by Skylark she is a 57ft x 12ft 6in Ledgard Class barge with centre wheelhouse and on-suite rear cabin.

She isn’t fully completed yet due to the customers needing to sell a property to finance the final fitting so she will be with us for a good few months if you would like to take a look at her.   

Water Explorer is a nifty little application designed to assist boaters navigating the UK’s inland waterways. It helps in three key areas: navigation, keeping a diary/blog of your journey and points of interest finder.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to maintain detailed records of your cruising.

You can click the banner above to view it in this website or go directly to the Water Explorer website HERE.